


Cognitive Recalibration

by stele3



Series: The Revenant 'Verse [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Brainwashing, Gen, Mind Control, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-04 13:46:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4139958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stele3/pseuds/stele3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The subject will need extensive re-programming.</p><p> </p><p>This fic deals primarily with Bucky's brainwashing under HYDRA, and his UN-brainwashing in the custody of The Avengers. It is a direct prequel/sequel to Revenant. Please note that the psychological science is totally made up. I am winging it.</p><p>If you're looking for a happy Steve/Bucky-centric story, this ain't it.</p><p>Thank you to Krait for the beta-reading.</p><p>ETA: Translation into Russian here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/5196224</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Когнитивная рекалибровка](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5196224) by [Saysly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saysly/pseuds/Saysly)
  * Translation into Polski available: [Rekalibracja poznawcza](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10699224) by [Ewka_LoL](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ewka_LoL/pseuds/Ewka_LoL)



The first time that Gaby meets Bucky Barnes, he’s seated on the floor of a bare apartment inside Stark Tower, listening to Captain America, née Captain Steven Rogers, speak quietly. His expression is tense. The left sleeve of his cotton t-shirt hangs empty.

As a starting point, it’s a good one. Usually the cases they call her for involve five-point restraints and screaming.

Captain Rogers is sitting next to him. Their postures mirror one another. Gaby wonders who sat down first and which one followed, but without requesting the videotapes from Mr. Stark she can’t be sure. There are certainly other ways to find out that information.

She takes a few steps into the room and stops there. She keeps her hands at her sides, her palms very slightly turned towards them. “Hello. I’m Gabriella Yoshimoto.”

They know, of course. She met briefly with Ms. Hill and Mr. Stark, who tell her that everyone has been briefed. It is all very well-organized and civilized. Privately she wants to laugh.

She does not. Instead she catches Captain Rogers’ eye and steps back slightly, indicating with the slant of her hips where he should go. “Captain, if you please.”

He goes, reluctantly, pausing to speak again in a low voice to the man sitting on the floor. She can’t catch the words but she doesn’t need to: the Captain’s body language tells her everything she needs to know. He is the protector, the guardian.

He is the lifeline she will need to cut if she is to succeed at her task.

Gaby waits until the door closes behind him before reaching into her purse. Bucky Barnes tracks the object in her hands as she unfolds it, quickly turning plastic supports, a kneeling cushion, and a hammock into a seiza bench. Approaching him, she sets it down a few feet away, takes off her shoes, and tucks her legs under her, settling onto the hammock.

Bucky Barnes watches, unmoving. The eye contact he makes is fleeting. Good.

Taking a breath into her belly, Gaby says, “I know you’ve heard this before, but I want to begin this by saying

 

                        that I will never lie to you.” Marthe cocks her head as the American kneeling on the floor in front of her coughs a laugh. It sounds congested. They said he punctured a lung in his great fall from the train. “Do you not believe me?”

The American presses his mouth together. He is shivering, either from the cold or from lingering shock. This morning the bandages had been removed and he’d seen the stump of flesh that is all that remains of his left arm. It will need to be operated on, likely cut back even further. The doctors want to wait until his lungs improve. The scientists grow impatient. Whatever has kept this American alive through impossible injuries, they want to know how it works.

Marthe is the compromise. His body will heal even as she breaks his mind.

“Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes,” the American says after some time passes between them in silence. “3-2-5...7...”

He trails off. His brow furrows. His eyes dart back and forth, searching.

“Are you having trouble remembering?” Marthe asks.

His gaze rises to hers, full of barely-concealed fear.


	2. Chapter 2

The first two days of deprogramming Bucky pass quickly and uneventfully. When Gaby returns to her suite—facing south towards the park—Mr. Stark’s artificial intelligence politely informs her that Mr. Stark is hosting a dinner upstairs, to which she has been invited. 

As a rule Gaby does not interact with the personals of her subjects—as Captain Rogers is sure to be in attendance—but the eponymous owner of the tower and one of the richest men in this capitalistic society? No. She is not so foolish.

She chooses a plain black skirt that goes to her knees and a long-sleeved pale green blouse with a Queen Anne neckline. Minimal makeup: coverup, a nude lip balm, black eyeliner on the top lid with the faintest wing. A little looser than professional, a queen loosening her crown for the weekend.

When queried the artificial intelligence reports that the elevator ride lasts two minutes. Gaby waits until thirteen minutes past then steps inside the elevator car.

By the time she arrives most of the initial pleasantries have been exchanged and the meal is very nearly to their plates. Perfect. In attendance: Mr. Stark, Captain Rogers, Natasha, Clint, Colonel Rhodes, and Dr. Banner.

“Ms. Yoshimoto, there you are,” Mr. Stark says. Gaby’s molars set together in response to the mistake in honorifics but she doesn’t comment, just moves forward to the only empty placement at the table. Captain Rogers, who had risen slightly when she entered the room, regains his seat without taking his eyes off her. “Thought you weren’t going to make it.”

“My apologies,” Gaby dissembles. “It has been a long day.”

Surprisingly, they wait until she has settled her napkin in her lap and eaten a reasonable portion of her meal before setting in with the questions. She mentally thanks them for it; it has been a long day and the crab tetrazzini is divine.

“So,” Mr. Stark asks at last. “How are things with the Manchurian Candidate?”

In her peripheral vision Gaby sees Captain Rogers lower his fork—but he looks at Mr. Stark, not at her. It would be easy to divide these two: something as simple as victory curls or jokes about Justin Beiber set them on opposite sides. At the moment she merely lifts her head and smiles faintly at Mr. Stark. “It proceeds. Did you receive my charting?”

“Yeah,” Mr. Stark says. “Didn’t look at it.”

Captain Rogers’ fork clinks against his plate. It would be so easy. “Would you prefer verbal reports?” Gaby inquires. 

“I’d prefer anything that makes him sound like a human being,” Mr. Stark says, neatly stepping outside of her dichotomy, damn him. Captain Rogers’ absurdly broad shoulders relax and turn on her.

“I apologize if I sound overly clinical in my doctor’s notes. A certain amount of distance must be kept between myself and the patient.” Gaby takes a sip of the wine in her glass—a lovely Viognier—and makes them wait. “However, I can assure you that, given the stability of his environment and his own willingness, I expect Bucky to be fully deprogrammed within a month.”

“A month?” Captain Rogers asks. 

“That’s impressive,” Natasha comments.

Gaby pauses in the act of loading her fork and turns a raised eyebrow. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

Natasha makes no follow-up, preferring to pretend-sip at her own wineglass. She’d stopped eating when Gaby entered the room. A shame to waste the food.

“Do you expect he’ll—I mean, will he be okay?” Captain Rogers asks. 

“He will be free from any cognitive disruptions and associated behavioral modifications put in place by HYDRA. Beyond that,” she spreads her hands, “he will need extensive psychotherapy, possibly for the rest of his life. To butcher an idiom, I can only reprogram the horse, Captain—I cannot make it drink.”

“ _Re_ program? I thought the goal was to remove any programming.”

“If you wanted him to be a vegetable. All deprogramming is _re_ programming, Captain. Every human being is programmed—first by our parents and peers, then by our religious and political leaders.” 

Taking her napkin in one hand, she pushes her chair back and rises. Captain Rogers immediately does so as well, though far less smoothly, and Gaby gestures between them. “Stimulus and response. You stand up for a lady because to not do so would, according to your programming, make you impolite, and you have been taught that being impolite to a lady is wrong. It’s an ingrained response, something that I doubt you even consider.” She casts a brief, pointed glance around the table and their seated observers. “Of course, programming changes all the time.”

When she meets his gaze again across the table, Captain Rogers’ eyebrows are knitting together. The blue of his eyes is really quite remarkable, especially given the rest of his coloring. No wonder Bucky is so consumed with him. Gaby eases him back down into his seat by retaking hers. “Bucky has been programmed to believe that many things are wrong, and his punishments for disobedience were far worse than social ostracism. The behavioral conditioning is impressive, both in depth and complexity. I suspect that we’re actually looking at multiple levels of conditioning, at different points in his captivity—likely when he changed hands from the Russian branch of HYDRA to, well...to the SHIELD branch.”

Grimaces pass over multiple faces like a wave. Only Dr. Banner manages to avoid the self-recrimination, understandably given his apparent lack of involvement in the recent fiasco. “Do you think they—pardon me, I know very little about your branch of science, Doctor. From what I understand, though, you’re saying that they brainwashed him multiple times? And that the different indoctrination systems are...co-existing in his mind?”

Gaby barely has to fake the smile that she grants him. Here is a man who knows how to speak to female colleagues. “Essentially, yes. From the mission profiles it appears that while in the custody of Russian HYDRA he was kept on a short leash, usually sent on missions that would be suicide for anyone else. They would essentially drop him into a hot zone and wait until he fought his way out before subduing him with audio cues. Little more than a feral dog set loose then brought back to heel. 

“Under SHIELD, however...he still had a containment team, yes, but he was frequently sent on long solo missions, the complexity of which went far beyond anything the Russians required of him. He had _expense accounts_. A completely different behavioral pattern.”

“Then why did the audio cues work in France? Why didn’t the patterns of indoctrination erase the first?”

“That becomes the grand question. My suspicion is that none of the attempts were completely successful. Memory-erasure gave them a blank palette—as impressionable as a newborn child. From there it would be simple, via reward and punishment, to control his belief systems and thus his behavior, but that meant each mission was a race against time. His neural regeneration is impressive, and given the right prompting he could potentially regain all of his memories within a span of three days. Not,” she adds, smiling in the facsimile of sympathy to Captain Rogers, “that it would be a good thing. Seventy years of torture and imprisonment should best be measured out with coffeespoons, don’t you agree?”

“So you think they had other means of controlling him,” Dr. Banner prompts softly, a clear diversion for Captain Rogers’ silent yet very obvious emotional distress. Dr. Banner is a brilliant and respectful man—a rare combination—but as a doctor he utterly fails to distance himself from his subjects. And they are his subjects: Gaby doesn’t need to see any charting to know that Dr. Banner has studied most of the people in this room very extensively.

“Naturally. And I don’t imagine those means were any more pleasant than the rest of his memories. SHIELD was usually much more interested in deactivating dangerous operatives than in producing individuals who could function independently. They also typically allowed more leeway on the subject of force.” A spasm crosses Captain Rogers’ face but he doesn’t waver from his tense study of her. “In any case, I doubt those methods would be effective with Bucky now...there’s very little that HYDRA hasn’t already done to him. Belief systems can always be changed, but my challenge will be to alter his conditioning without using...an equal level of force.” 

“You sound pretty, uh, enthusiastic about that, Doctor.”

“I do enjoy a challenge.” 

“So much for talking about him like a human being, huh?” Mr. Stark cuts in.

Rage is not useful in this situation. Gaby cuts it off at the base and says, “You’ll have to pardon me on that regard, I do tend to be—overly clinical. It’s a common trait among individuals with antisocial personality disorder,” she adds, plucking up her wine glass for a leisurely mouthful.

Across the table, Dr. Banner sits forward. “You have ASPD? What, ah, which sub-type, if you don’t mind me asking.”

She doesn’t. She had counted on either him or Stark diagnosing her eventually; better that it happen now, in a way that she can control. Gaby sits back, drawing their attention to her like a lapdog. “Narcissistic, as it happens, Doctor. I was diagnosed when I was seventeen.”

“Oh you’re a sociopath,” Mr. Stark says. “That’s great.”

Gaby imagines sliding a blade between Mr. Stark’s carotid artery and his trachea. Making him choose which to cut.

She smiles at him blandly. “In this case, it’s rather useful. May I remind you, Mister Stark, that you hired me. I am here at your disposal.”

“Only because there were six names on Coulson’s list, three on Fury’s, and you were the first one on both. Why?”

Gaby taps the stem of her wine glass. “Because Natasha Romanoff is not HYDRA.”

There is a long pause before Natasha gets up from the table and leaves the room without saying a word. 

Unexpectedly Clint keeps his seat instead of following her. When Gaby looks at him, he shrugs. “I’m not HYDRA either. In case anyone was wondering.”

She scoffs. “You were a remodel. The alien had you for less than a week and you’d already lived thirty-two years as Clint Barton. She,” Gaby gestures at Natasha’s empty chair, “was a full demolition and reconstruction.”

“What do you mean, demolition,” Captain Rogers asks tightly.

Gaby removes the napkin from her lap and sets it beside her plate, balances her silverware on the upper right-hand edge. “They had programmed her with false memories of a life she never lived, in order to guarantee her loyalty. She was a ballerina, she had a husband, her parents loved her...all untrue.”

“She knew that,” Clint challenged. “She knew it was fake the whole time.”

“Yes, but she accepted it _anyway_. Every mind has a breaking point, beyond which it creates a new persona more likely to survive the present situation. Natasha survived the Red Room because she was able to fully accept the programming they presented her with—she _became_ the person they wanted her to be, even though she knew that everything they told her about that person was a lie.

“In order to accept the new programming under SHIELD, Natasha's survival persona had to be destroyed—as will Bucky's. Which is why,” she continues, rising to her feet, “it pays to have a sociopath on call.”

Captain Rogers rises as well, without taking his eyes off of her. If he had his shield in hand it would probably be pointed in her direction.


	3. Chapter 3

Something has happened. The Comdiv and many of the senior commanders disappeared overnight, and Marthe would fear a purge of the whole program if the portrait of Vozhd Stalin had not vanished along with them. As it has, she is merely puzzled instead of terrified. 

A two-day period passes in which the villa is virtually unguarded except for a few nervous junior commanders and Marthe thinks that maybe she could take Anne and run, make it to the forest, escape to Berlin...

Then a caravan of trucks rumbles up the hill and the door closes. It is almost a relief.

These new commanders are different. Whatever purge just occurred, it did not left them in fear of another: they do not call her ‘comrade’ and they speak with open derision of the МГБ and even of Stalin. Their uniform collars bear a small red pin that Marthe has never seen before. It is not the red star insignia that she has grown accustomed to—instead it is a strange creature with many limbs. 

She expects a summons and they do not disappoint. The villa’s new commander is Aleksander Lukin, a narrow-faced man with a Lenin-esque goatee that does nothing to camouflage the gleam in his eye. “Doctor Breite, how excellent to meet you. Please sit.”

They make conversation for a few minutes, something mindless. Marthe makes responses when necessary and allows her mind to drift. Lausanne, in the summertime, at her grandfather’s winery. Row upon row of grapevines etched into the hillside above the lake. The smell of dirt in her nose.

Abruptly Lukin’s tone changes. “Were you aware, Doctor, that the Project Revenant subject is in truth the American soldier known as James Barnes?”

Breite’s attention snaps back into focus. “Yes,” she answers after a moment. “When he was first transferred, he identified himself as such. Repeatedly.”

“And were you aware that Comdiv Karpov withheld that information from his report?”

Dirt has turned to ash, the ash of bodies burned in ovens. There hadn’t been many places to flee when the Third Reich edged nearer. Jonas had stayed in Hungary; he’d had his work and his pride, his stubborn belief in the good of humanity. He is almost certainly dead now—nothing but ash. Marthe had taken Anne and fled eastward: between the two evils facing them, she chose to try her luck with the Communists. 

She wonders, not for the first time, if she was wrong.

“No, I was not aware.”

He nods, flipping open a file and frowning as he looks at it. The gesture is strictly performative—his eyes aren’t even moving over the page—and a series of realization fall like the tumblers of a lock in Marthe’s mind: none of this is true. The accusations, like so many others, are nothing but an excuse for Lukin to seize control of the project. Which means that she doesn’t need to worry about pleasing the МГБ—just this man, with his cadre of commanders wearing their strange pins and calling Vozhd Stalin ‘Uncle Joe’ like the Americans.

“Comdiv Karpov and I did not spend much time together,” she says and Lukin lifts his head, then his eyebrows. “I do not make a habit of befriending my captors.”

It is a gambit and for a terrible moment of silence Marthe thinks of Anne upstairs, sitting at her little table by the window and carefully practicing her numbers. Then Lukin laughs, short and barking, and sits forward.

“Very well,” he says, tossing the file down on the desk carelessly, “shall we be more direct?”

“If you wish,” Marthe demurs.

His lips curl. “I am here because certain intelligence has indicated that the Project Revenant subject received a version of the same chemical cocktail given to the Great American. I do not think I need to explain the significance of this information.”

“No.” It does not come as any surprise. For months the whispered theory has been that the Americans actually succeeded in replicating their serum, and that a massive army of super-soldiers is bearing down on Moscow. It had scared the unit’s Comdiv enough that he ordered the execution of all other prisoners held at the villa, an assortment of captured American, British, and French personnel that Marthe had been working to turn into sleeper agents. Now it appears that the Comdiv and his fellow commanders have joined them.

A quick bullet, Marthe thinks, is a far greater mercy than whatever purpose awaits their remaining prisoner. His cell is just below their feet. The Russians love their symbolism. 

When she doesn’t expand on her monosyllabic response, Lukin makes an empty gesture to fill the silence. “Given these revelations, my superiors have doubts as to your chances of success. An errant G.I. is one thing—but Bucky Barnes? He may not be so easily broken.”

Marthe thinks of Anne, upstairs. The single room they share is actually directly above this one; this, too, is not an accident. Her thick dark hair, so much like her father’s, has grown past her shoulders, and though Marthe has offered to braid it for her, Anne prefers to wear it tied back with a scarf, in the style popularized by _Rabotnitsa_ magazine. She will be seven years old this July. 

“He will be,” she says.


	4. Chapter 4

In the end it’s almost disappointingly simple, if time-consuming. She goes through the asset mantra line-by-line with him, demanding to know the reasoning behind each statement and why he could ever allow himself to believe it. When he gets defensive she subtly ridicules him. When he shouts and jumps to his feet, pacing to get away from her, she summons the stone-faced alien to pin Bucky in place with his hammer, then in her gentlest voice asks Bucky if he wants Steve to hear about him acting this way?

Over three weeks they inch across the room until Bucky has his back against the wall across from the bed with Gaby seated on her seiza bench directly in front of him. If she could have gotten the okay to pin him with the hammer from start to finish she likely could have broken him in a week, flat. 

A shattered plate never quite fits together again perfectly no matter how much glue is used, and breaks that much easier under stress. 

Bucky comes apart in pieces. First of course there are the survival personas to get through: they are not quite the alters of Dissociative Identity Disorder, but they’re something close. Like a boxer throwing wild punches, he flings these different versions of himself at her, trying to see which one will make her stop, which will _work_.

Gaby sits, unmoved, unblinking. She says, “You’re going to kill Steve.”

That crumbles him. He stares at her, his eyes bloodshot and circled with dark skin. Sleep deprivation is outside the strict safety parameters laid on Gaby—but she can’t be held accountable if Bucky has spent the last three nights pacing and agitated instead of resting.

Or she could, but would easily be able to dismiss the blame.

She pressed onward, driving into the widening crack at his center. “At the moment he’s obeying my command to stay away for his own safety—but both you and I know he won’t forever. If this drags on much longer, he’ll grow impatient and do something rash. He’ll _rescue_ you.

“You may not kill him right away. Maybe years will pass. Maybe you’ll go to bed together, ten years from now, and you’ll gut him in your sleep. Maybe you’ll hear the wrong phrase on a news broadcast and you will choke the life from him with your own hands. But it _will_ happen.”

“No,” he whispers.

“It’s inevitable. It’s what they made you to do.”

“Nononono.” Bucky begins to cover his ears but Gaby shifts minutely closer and he rears back, pressing his shoulders into the wall.

“You can stop it, Bucky. You can save him. All you have to do...is let go.”

He wavers, snagged on the precipice, trembling in body and mind.

Gaby considers arranging her face into something compassionate, or menacing. Instead she follows her gut and goes for honesty: she looks him right in the eye and says, “It’s the only way to save him. Let go, Bucky.”

It is... _fascinating_ to watch someone die this way. Not the crude, messy slick of blood and organs and feces, but the slow, inward collapse of _self_ like a nebula unraveling into a black hole. 

One flicker remains. A tiny, impossible pinpoint prick of light. 

The Russians had missed it, but the Americans hadn’t. Gaby rather wishes she could go back in time and shake the hand of Secretary Alexander Pierce. Doctor Marthe von der Breite had done remarkable work, work that Gaby now recognizes as the unacknowledged template of all modern behavioral modification theory; but she’d left a sizable hole in the shape of one Captain Rogers, through which Bucky had made his eventual escape. 

Secretary Pierce, however, had not only recognized that shortcoming, he had—with no formal training in psychology—found a way to exploit it. Where his predecessors had seen a flaw, he’d created opportunity by presenting himself as a viable substitute: a blond-haired, blue-eyed idealist with a square jaw who Bucky instinctively obeyed, virtually eliminating the need for memory wipes. It had been as successful as it was audacious, and Gaby struggles to hide her admiration. 

She doubts that Mr. Stark or Captain Rogers would share her sentiments.

And now Gaby has surpassed her predecessors. For a long, long moment she sits with the shuddering, nearly-empty shell of Bucky Barnes and lets herself imagine snuffing out the tiny flicker that has survived for so long. It would be so simple. The words form in her mind: _you are no longer a creature capable of being loved._

Her toes curl in her shoes. She sighs deeply. 

Sometimes being sensible is very tiresome.

Shifting back, she pitches her voice to perfectly dissonate with the recording of Dr. Breite and says, “You are a child, born in Brooklyn. You are a soldier, who fights for his country. You are a friend, who cares for his fellows. You are—”


	5. Chapter 5

“Edelweiss...arnica,” Anne murmurs before tucking her tongue in one corner of her mouth. Her small fingers weave the stems of the flowers together.

“Very good.” Marthe reaches out to touch one of the yellow flowers. “And what can they be used for?”

“Arnica for cuts and bruises, edelweiss for the belly. And for the Nazis, who wore them in their caps.”

Marthe hesitated. “Yes. Who told you that?”

“One of the guards. He said the motherland saved us from the Nazis _and_ the Americans.” She peeks up at Marthe’s face as she speaks. They have so little time when they are truly alone—and even now, there are guards within eyesight, slouched against a low stone wall and smoking. And there may be microphones even out here, in the flowering garden. She and Anne come out here quite frequently in the warmer months, when their room upstairs seems too small to bear. It, certainly, is bugged.

They have so few ways to truly communicate: eyes, facial expressions, hidden hand signals. Marthe wonders how much has slipped through the cracks—how many lies have been poured into Anne’s ears that she has not corrected. 

She wonders exactly how badly she has failed her daughter.

“Comrade Breite.” The Comdiv’s assistant, a narrow-faced man, is striding toward them. “Why have you not answered the Comdiv?”

Marthe stares up at him. “I did not know he wanted any kind of answer from me.”

“He is waiting for you in the upstairs training facility. Your daughter may remain here, but you must come with me.” 

Dread has become such a commonplace part of Marthe’s life that she barely notices the sensation anymore. Now the pot kept on low simmer begins to rattle anew. She rises, wiping dirt from her palms and smiling down at Anne, whose eyes dart between them.

As they walk inside she keeps her voice level. “Has something gone wrong with the subject?”

He does not answer, but leads her to the back elevator. Further questions press at her throat but Marthe swallows them down. She is calm. She is composed. She is—

The assistant lifts up the grated door and the smell of blood fills Marthe’s nose. There are no bodies in sight. Comdiv Lukin stands near the far windows along with several guards and a number of physical trainers. They have been working on the subject’s muscle memory, seeing how much it retains despite its faulty memory and the experiments that Lukin’s scientists have begun to perform. Two of them are here now: bespectacled men in lab coats, they hunch over their clipboards. One, she notes, has a ring of bruises around his throat.

The Revenant subject itself stands in the center of their loose circle, staring at nothing. 

“Comrade Breite, come in. Did you not receive my message? We have been waiting.” Lukin gestures leisurely, indicating that she stand next to him. 

“Apologies.” Marthe moves to join them. She glances at the subject. The shoulder of its threadbare shirt is wet with blood, as is its hand and face. It bears an alarming number of bruises; but those, Marthe knows, will vanish very shortly.

“It is no matter. Come, give us your opinion—your subject has done well today and Comrade Zenkova believes it is time we introduced guns. What do you think?”

“What I think,” Marthe says slowly. It is difficult, sometimes, to box up the person she is with Anne—to keep that part of herself away from this.

She looks at the subject. It has not moved since she came in the room. Their last session in the basement had been utterly silent: Breite had taken her chair and sat with him for an hour while Lukin’s microphones recorded their breathing. The subject had not moved once, had not lifted its head, had barely blinked. 

Turning back to Lukin, she says, “It is my opinion that the subject will follow explicit instructions exactly as given. Its executive functions are nil and it will not... _intuit_ any other extensions of a command that may _seem_ like logical conclusions to us. For instance, if ordered to kill a man it will do so but may fail to defend itself against the man’s fellow troops.”

“That, we have already learned,” Lukin announces to the room at large. A few give wry smiles and one of the physical trainers barks with laughter. “So in your opinion there is not any danger that the subject will, if presented with more advanced weaponry, break through your conditioning? Or will balk at any task that we put before it?”

The pot of dread in Marthe’s belly is bubbling over. There is something wrong here, something—but she cannot see what. 

Outwardly she maintains her composure and answers, “In my opinion, no. It will not.”

Lukin’s lips curl upward. “Excellent. Comrade Zenkova.”

Zenkova, a huge man with a bald head tattooed with the same octopus-like emblem they all wear on their pins, steps closer to the subject and holds out a long, narrow rifle. “Take this.” 

The Revenant subject obeys without lifting its eyes. Its hair hangs low on its brow, almost in its bloodshot eyes. It barely looks human anymore—as if it has already died and now truly embodies its name. 

“Assume prone firing position at the window. Target the young girl in the garden.”

_Anne_.

“No,” Marthe says, “no, _please_ , I beg you, don’t—” She lunges at the Revenant subject even as it moves to obey the instructions, propping the barrel of the gun on the window’s ledge in absence of a left hand. Lukin and one of the guards seize her and draw her back.

“Hush, now,” Lukin says. “All is well, I assure you.”

“ _Please, no_ , not Anne! Please, please, I have done all that you asked, it isn’t—it isn’t _useful_ to hurt her, she’s just a _child_. I’ve given you no reason—”

“Hush,” Lukin tells her, then to the subject: “Fire.”

“ _No!_ ” Marthe screams.

The rifle clicks. Empty.

It feels as though Marthe’s innards have shriveled. Distantly she feels Lukin’s hand patting her shoulder. “There, you see?” he says. “I loaded the rifle myself, with an empty cartridge. She was never in any danger, we simply needed to be sure that it would follow orders exactly. Just as you said.”

The guards are stepping forward, taking the rifle from the asset, forcing it to its knees. Lukin steers Marthe away as they begin to beat it. His arm is around Marthe’s shoulders; if it were not, she would likely have gone to her knees as well.

Lukin continues in a low voice. “I am terribly sorry for the alarm, Comrade. If only you had come upstairs quicker, I could have spared you the fright—but I could not have explained the deception while our subject was in the room. It needed to fully believe that its magazine held a bullet intended for little Anne, and that it would fire without any hesitation. You see?”

“Yes,” Marthe says. Her lips feel slightly numb. 

They have reached the elevator that leads down from the attic. Without releasing his hold on her Lukin pulls down the gate and presses the button to make them descend. As they slowly do so, Marthe blankly watches the beating continue. 

The asset is silent even as the soldiers strike it again and again. It is always silent, now.


	6. Chapter 6

Though she instructed Captain Rogers to be ready by 0600, Gaby takes the elevator to the Captain’s quarters at 0540. 

She catches him unprepared, just as she intended, with his white undershirt untucked from his jeans and his hair damp. He doesn’t quite scowl at her, but he does look at little put out to have been caught looking so disheveled. Fortunately Gaby came prepared and lifts a steaming mug of coffee to ease her way. “Ms. Potts said that you were partial to the Arabica blend.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” He takes the peace offering but still retreats a little to the end table, ostensibly to use the mirror there as he pulls on and buttons up his shirt. She’s pleased to see that he followed her instructions with regards to his garb: not too modern, but not a costume of his former self, either. Today they’ll be testing the limits of Bucky’s response to visual cues, and that requires both the presence of Captain Rogers and Bucky’s memory of the same. “I’ll be ready in just a few moments. Sorry if I’m keeping you.”

“Not at all.” Gaby settles in to watch him finish dressing and thinks that if she were at all interested in either the physical act of sex or the entanglements of partnership, she would want someone like Steven Rogers. Someone who could fuck standing up yet calls her ‘Doctor.’ Still a lower life form, but polite and pleasant to look at.

Fortunately, Gaby is exactly who and what she is. She draws a breath into her belly and says, “I thought the two of us should speak before we go upstairs.”

“What about?” he asks without turning.

Biting back a flare of irritation at the uncharacteristic disrespect, Gaby explains, “In order for the deprogramming process to be successful, you need to be absolutely sure that it will be. It’s a matter of _will_ , Captain. Ours must be stronger than theirs. Or his.”

In the mirror the Captain’s head is bowed, eyes on the lower buttons as he does them up. His fingers are incongruous on the body of a soldier, long and deft and tapered. The hands of an artist. “Well, you made it sound like this would work, and you’re the expert.”

A thread of tension underlay his words and Gaby made to seize it and pull it out directly. “That’s just it, though, isn’t it? I am the expert, and you need to trust me. But you don’t.”

For a beat he remains before the mirror, his hands stilled in the act of tucking his shirt into his pants—then he turns to face her. His expression tries to be stoic but lands on relieved instead. He is not made for disassemblage; not for the first time she wonders how it feels to be so astonishingly simple. Not stupid, but an entire novel written on one page, each word stated in a single sentence with no ambiguity. 

“All right,” he says. “No. I don’t trust you. I believe that you’re not HYDRA but I don’t trust your intentions toward Bucky. I think all of this is—a _game_ to you.”

Tricky. Gaby tries for honesty and says, “It is.”

That’s the wrong choice. His mouth tightens. “That’s not acceptable to me. Bucky isn’t a toy.”

“No, he’s a soldier. One that we need on our side. Resource management is my favorite type of game, Captain, but surely someone from your generation can understand the concept of a ‘greater good.’”

“What greater good?” he scoffs. “That used to mean something, but I don’t think you know what it is.”

Contempt flares beyond Gaby’s capacity to conceal. “Spoken like a true white American man. Do you really think that anyone else in those good old days got to enjoy the freedom you fought so hard for?”

His eyes narrow. He’s a fool, but he isn’t stupid. “Yoshimoto is a Japanese name, isn’t it?”

Gaby purses her lips and decides to change her body language; she takes a few steps sideways to half-sit, half-lean on the back of his couch. It’s a position of familiarity and submission. It tells him, ‘all right, you’ve beaten me.’ 

Steve Rogers is not a man to kick an opponent while they’re down.

“Yes, it is,” she says, folding her hands into a discreet prayer position. “But Gabriela is Peruvian. Peru was one of the first South American countries to open diplomatic relations with Japan, and as such there was a sizable Japanese population living in Peru until 1941.”

His chin rises slightly and she tilts hers to the side, prompting, “Can you guess what happened in 1941, Captain?”

“Japs attacked Pearl Harbor.”

“‘Japs’ is a racial slur, Captain,” she corrects coolly. “Though I suppose it was very common to say in your time, I’ll thank you for not using it again.” He flushes with surprised shame and just like that, she regains the upper hand. “You’re correct, though. After Pearl Harbor, the US government negotiated with Peru for the arrest and transport of about 2,000 Japanese-Peruvian citizens. My grandmother was one of them. Her husband, being fully Peruvian, abandoned her to US hands.

“Unfortunately for my grandmother, she was a beautiful woman and beautiful women alone always draw the wrong kind of attention. My father was born in the Crystal City internment camp to a mother who hated the sight of his face, because it reminded her too much of the US soldier who raped her. You see, you, too, have had your camps. And the same kind of bombs that you sacrificed yourself to keep from US soil were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing millions of civilians.

“So if you’re questioning my morality, Captain— _don’t._ I don’t have any. I’ve never seen the point of hampering myself that way, not in the kind of world we live in.”

He visibly swallows back his instinctive retort and asks, “Why are you here, then?”

“Because times have changed,” Gaby admits. “These days, America is one of the few places in the world that a neuro-atypical brown and yellow woman can move through society with some freedom. I have no intention of allowing a neo-Nazi cult to ruin that for me.

“So here we are.” She straightens from the couch, putting her shoulders back. A call to arms. The Captain subtly mirrors the movement and oh, she could twist him whichever way she wanted. No wonder Natasha has attached herself to him—though even Gaby can’t be sure whether her red-haired creation intends to protect Captain Rogers or twist him up herself. Maybe both. “You want your lover returned to health and I want to preserve my freedom. I won’t claim that my motives, or SHIELD’s, are anything but self-serving...but then, so are yours.”

The Captain presses his lips together until they pale, and Gaby smiles, angling her hips to show him 

 

__where to stand. The asset goes willingly with its eyes forward, though Marthe can tell that it’s unsettled by the camera and the various commanders ranging across the driveway, speaking amongst themselves and watching it in turn.

She highly doubts that anyone else will notice its discomfiture. The signs are so minute...only someone who has spent hours and hours in its company would notice them.

There are many, many thing about the asset that Marthe thinks no one else will notice. Some of them she has shared with Lukin. Some she has not.

Now she stands in the stone path that leads into the garden with her hands folded in front of her. They’ve dressed the asset in the uniform of an enlisted Russian soldier. They want a picture, something to send back to their superiors, whoever that may be. She doubts they answer in truth to Stalin or any of his ministers.

The asset reaches her side and turns with the precision of a much healthier creature. It is still healing from the tests they have inflicted on it over the last month: strength, endurance, speed, and the simple brute cruelty of determining how much its body can heal from.

When they threw it off the roof onto the cobblestoned courtyard, Anne’s lovely new ribbon was sacrificed to make earplugs for them both. They could still hear it screaming in terror and broken agony outside, and Marthe does not know if she hates herself more for that or for Anne’s confused, frightened tears.

Now it barely limps and it does not seem to bear any grudge against the commanders who mill around that very courtyard, which has been washed clean of its blood. Possibly it doesn’t even remember the tests. They have been taking it to the facility in Cottbus with increasing frequency, now that they are reasonably sure that their machines will not damage it beyond use. 

The machines have made the reprogramming process difficult, as occasionally they go too far and burn out Breite’s careful instructions. Lukin commissioned a recording, however, that can be played before and after each visit to Cottbus, and he assures her that it works well to correct the asset’s behavior. Marthe would worry about being replaced by an analog version of herself, except that Lukin has already begun to speak of others. Other subjects for her to break and reshape as soldiers of Mother Russia...or whoever Lukin truly serves. 

The asset stands at attention beside her, staring at nothing in particular. They will take it away soon, likely for good. They are making some kind of prosthetic: she has seen them measuring its right arm, examining the stump that remains of its left. She has done her work, given them their obedient, mindless revenant, and soon they will make it a soldier. 

Marthe is looking at it too much. It is a thing, an object, not something to gaze at as steadily as she is right now. They’ll notice before long. At the moment they’re distracted with their own success, but Lukin is far too observant for that to last much longer. She needs to...

She reaches out and takes hold of the bill of the cap on the asset’s head. Its eyes snap to hers—not quite, of course, just slightly to the right in order to avoid eye contact.

For a brief moment, Marthe’s outstretched arm blocks her face from the camera and those who have gathered to gloat over their little tableau. In that moment, Marthe whispers, “You are in love. Remember.”

Then she steps back and says, “Remove your clothes.”

He strips at once, shucking the uniform to flop on the ground. A frisson of confusion runs through the assembled commanders—but then Lukin laughs. Marthe catches his eye and he smiles in a way that implies if he had a glass, he’d raise it to her.

The cloth cap splats against the ground when she lets it fall. Marthe folds her hands in front of her again and, shoulder to shoulder with Sergeant James Buchanan, turns to face the camera.


End file.
